So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

As you may be able to glean from the title if you are into comic sci-fi books, I am reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (The Trilogy of Four) right now for the first time, even though it has been recommended to me by just about everyone I know (and some I don’t). So I am reading it and it is wonderful. You also should read it.

Now on to things about which you have a greater chance of caring, namely the cat. I don’t remember what I wrote in the last blog cat-wise since I blog through an “agent.” You can ignore whatever I said before because that cat turned up dead. Yep, another one down. I know that I continue to joke about cats that keep dying and how when we got this last one, I was going to name it Snowball (I, II, III, etc) because it would die, ha, ha, ha. EXCEPT THE DAMN THING UP AND DIED! Sick jokes are not funny when they prove to be prophetic. Sally is not to be deterred however and is already on the prowl for kitten #4 that we can spend a bunch of money on until it dies. In the meantime, we have found it considerably easier to steal the kitten of our 3-year old neighbor. It is sort of like stealing candy from children only easier because the candy runs to you if you don’t abuse it and feed it fish bones and put a flea collar on it. Basically the cat now hangs out here all day until we kick it out at night so that the 3-year old thinks he has a cat. Thankfully, this cat already has a name (Ginger) so we don’t have to fret about that and since the cat isn’t technically ours, it won’t be any big deal when it dies.



So last week, Sally and I joined just about everyone else on the island at the Primary School Games—an Olympic-style track and field event on a much, much smaller scale and with shorter participants. That being said, this was a serious deal including all 7 of the Primary Schools on our island. There is an amazing amount of inefficiency in this country and basically any time that we try to do something, the way is blocked by countless things broken, or people missing, etc. Not at the Primary School Games. I am going to invite the NCAA next year to perhaps model their meets after this—there was a real track (on grass and the kids were barefoot), measured to Olympic specifications, relays with real batons, heats, lane assignments by qualifying time, simultaneous track and field events, timers for each lane, all for multiple age groups, and these kids had seriously trained. There was a starting gun for crying out loud!





Speaking of starting guns and crying out loud, there was a 50m event for the under 7 girls. At the end of one of the heats, there was a little girl crying her eyes out at the scoring table after her race, clearly disappointed with her race. It was pretty cute. But then in the next heat, more little girls were crying, and I thought that maybe it wasn’t so cute. Maybe it is kind of sick that at the age of 6, these girls are so driven to win that they cry if they don’t. I had thought that was a uniquely American thing to make your kids so driven to win that they can’t accept anything else as success. Then I got mad at the games and decided that maybe these little girls shouldn’t be pushed into this at all. That was about when one of the women behind me told me, laughing hysterically, that the little girls are afraid of the starting gun and cry the whole way down the 50m track because the gun scared them. That’s more like it, I thought! 6-year old girls should cry when they hear a gun. Sometimes I do.




Here is something else that I love about Fiji—you can laugh at anything and anyone. I first started noticing this when someone would simply trip, namely myself. In the US, the polite thing to do is to pretend that you didn’t see it. Here when someone trips, the appropriate thing to do is to laugh at them, preferably pointing. I thought, fair enough. Tripping is inherently funny, and since we all do it, we should all just go ahead and laugh when someone does it, including oneself. One day I was walking by a bunch if kids outside but in a class with some teachers and I heard uproarious laughter. I looked around and saw that the cause for this ruckus was an old, crippled man being carried by a younger man like a sack of potatoes. My first thought was that the teachers will be upbraiding these kids any second now, but when I saw the teachers, they were leading the laughing brigade. Too much, I thought. It is one thing to laugh at someone healthy who trips, but an old crippled man? Too far…until the young man reached the place to set the old man down. When he did so, the old man sat down and the young man turned and faced the kids and they both waved, clearly laughing themselves. Everyone was laughing. Then there was the time that a friend of mine tricked me into asking his uncle, “E vei nomu ta?” (How is your father?). His response, “Sa mate, fuck you!” (He’s dead. The rest is untranslatable). Then everyone erupted in uproarious laughter. His parents really are dead and everyone, including the man with the dead parents, thought it was the best joke they’d heard all day.

OK, so here was the lesson I learned. You don’t hide stuff here in Fiji, because it wouldn’t do you any good. Everyone knows everything about you so pretending that you did not trip or aren’t crippled would be stupid. In the US, you pretend that you don’t see things that people do and if you do think that they are funny you pretend you don’t. It was funny how the man was being carried and everyone had a good laugh over it, including the man being carried. No feelings were hurt. We should laugh more when people do things that are funny because pretending that they aren’t funny, doesn’t make them any less funny, it just makes us tactful, and I am starting to think that tact sometimes looks a lot like dishonesty. It is certainly less fun.

On the home front, there are some pretty serious improvements going on. No longer content to live like the heathen, we have made some significant purchases, namely a refrigerator, an oven, a hot water heater, a washing machine, and a couch. Now before you get too excited, you should be aware that these items cost less than $100 between them, and that only because coolers are really, really expensive here. Fridge: We found out the health clinic has a freezer and so we bought a tiny, lunch-box-ish cooler to throw some cheese in with an ice pack. Of course, we can only buy cheese once every two months. More importantly, where there is ice, there is martinis (yes, “is martinis”—sort of like I Am Who Am). Oh yeah. You can do the math. Oven: I made a solar oven out of 2 cardboard boxes and some aluminum foil. It works like crap. Actually, it works fine as long as the sun is doing its job, which is rarely here. Then one day, Sally left it out in the rain. Turns out that cardboard is a poor choice in the tropics. Hot water heater: I just ran about 20m of black pipe on my roof and will be taking my first warm (dare I say, hot?) shower today. This system however has the same absurd sunshine requirements as the solar oven. Washing machine: Nope, this is still just Sally. Couch: This is a piece of foam padding that will be our bed upon your visit. In the meantime, it is folded up against a wall making a very nice couch indeed. Probably the most important upgrade to the house has to do with the toilet. After three months of our toilet leaking from places that a properly sanitary system would not, I managed to track down some parts to fix it. No longer is there a cesspool behind our toilet! Were the Coffmans not such discerning folks and if they didn’t already have their plane tickets for early December, I am not sure that the toilet would be so functional. It still just drains into a hole on the side of the house. You can’t win them all, but you can plant flowers on top of it!

Here are some sun dried tomatoes, home-growed and drying nicely in the solar oven.


Solar hot water doing its thing.


Solar cooker, version 2.0


Washing machine "taking a break."

A Day at the Beach

In looking at the photos that have been posted, I noticed a significant lack of anything that looks remotely nice. Sorry about that. This place is really beautiful. So, I will now start my campaign to show how beatiful Koro is and I will start underwater. Here are some shots from a reef in front of Dere Bay, where you will stay for at least a bit when you come and visit. The Coffmans can tell you all about it since they are due in a few weeks. I can't tell you how excited I am to show off this place to some friends. Who's next?

Things I am Pretty Sure About

This is post from early September that never made its way onto the page. I am not pointing any fingers about who is to blame for that (Andy and Bobby, I repeat, I am not pointing my finger at you), but here it is. If you are confused about the timeline, put this post before the one below it in your brain. Good luck.

I am pretty sure that frogs have a secret passageway into our house. I have now spent considerable energy and resources in frog abatement only to be continually overrun. These are not your ordinary, cute, endangered tree frogs with those cool eyes. These are cane toads, unfortunate imports from somewhere from where they should never have been brought. They are the scourge of the tropics in the South Pacific and I remember them being a problem when I lived in Australia. Luckily here, no one has imported anything even nastier to try to kill them that end up being a bigger problem like they did in Australia. Since they are nonnative, there is nothing to kill them so they run rampant. What’s worse is that they are somewhat poisonous so nothing will ever learn to start eating them (and live to tell the tale, anyway). When walking at night, it is par for the course to step on 2-3 and have at least that many jump onto your leg. Tonight, when I was I walking around, a cane toad jumped immediately into the upswing of my leg as I stepped forward, resulting in my accidentally kicking the toad up as it was jumping up as well. That thing went flying. It was really funny to see. Anyway, I digress. When we first stayed in this house, there were regularly 5-10 toads that found themselves trapped in the house. I have since spent a lot of time putting screen over pipes, filling in missing concrete, and blocking cracks under doors. The stupid part is that they don’t want to be in here. They get inside and realize that it was a huge mistake, resulting in their frantically hopping around looking for their escape. I used to usher them out with whatever was handy, which took a lot of swatting and swearing. Now I just pick them up and throw them out. It is easier. I was hoping that the cat would help out on this front but he just seems perplexed by them, recognizing (in a rare bout of intelligence) that they can’t be eaten.

I am pretty sure that this kitten is sticking around. If you remember, this is our third kitten, the first two having met their untimely demise…or so we thought. It turns out that kitten 2 wasn’t dead at all, just lost. After giving her up for dead, we moved on and procured another cat, a black and white thing that what he lacks in intelligence, he more than makes up for in cuteness. We have been teaching him to eat lizards and bugs and the like so that he doesn’t die when we leave the island. Since people don’t so much feed pets as much as throw scraps outside and let the throngs of starving, quasi-domesticated dogs and cats sort it out, we realized that we will need to toughen Pierre up a little before our first trip at the end of September. Pierre, you ask? He got the name Pierre based on his pretentious look about him and he also has black markings that look like a moustache and goatee. Well, I am calling him Pierre 1 for two reasons. The first is that I am sure he will meet an untimely end, and the second is that it sounds like Pier 1 and since I absolutely hate Pier 1 (thanks to my wedding registry experiences there), I figure that it will soften the blow when he “disappears.” Anyway, back to the cat that didn’t die, turns out that one night when we left her out and went to some friends’, she got spooked and hid under someone’s porch for something like 2 weeks. Some kids found her and brought her back here, only by that time, we had Pier 1, and man did he not like her. I have some great footage of the two of them working out whose house this is. Pier 1 won and so we gave the previously dead cat to someone else.

I am pretty sure that I will actually do some work while in the Peace Corps. Work has started to pick up around here. We met with the community in a bose vakoro, which is like a town hall meeting, only you wear skirts and sit on the floor, and we explained what our purpose is here. They talked a little about how we may be of use and away we go. There is some significant drama surrounding who is in charge of this island-wide environmental management support team that I am really here for, so I am staying clear of that until it clears itself. If it doesn’t, my time here will be a little less structured than I originally thought. I did just finish a pretty large grant application for this team to run environmental workshops and work on marine protected areas throughout the island. It looks like we will probably get it (around FJ$80k) but depending on who ends up on top of this power struggle, I may regret having written the grant. Otherwise, the village where we live has decided that they are tired of running their generators (the only electricity, which they only run a couple of hours a day in the evening) on diesel that has to be barged in and costs an arm and a leg. They don’t like the fumes and want to do their part in global warming abatement. So, they asked me if I know anything about biofuel?! It just so happens I do. If there is anything on this island, there are coconuts, so I am going to look into the financial viability of pressing coconuts for oil and building a processor for biodiesel. It may not be worth it financially to make biodiesel out of the oil, because the oil is worth a fair amount in cosmetics and food, so it may be a pipe dream. That being said, it is pretty cool that abjectly poor people living on a tiny, disconnected island in the middle of nowhere in a country in the middle of nowhere are looking at alternative energy options. What’s your excuse?

We also met with the recently formed women’s group in our village and they are really excited to get going on beautifying the village, starting with picking up some of the trash. Like any good third world country village, no one ever really decided on a plan for solid waste. So, for many years it has just been thrown where one was when they were done using it. The current plan is for each household to have their own pit for non-burnable rubbish (metal and glass) and to burn the rest (plastic included). What that has really meant is that a lot of people throw it in the ocean. The problem with throwing something in the ocean is that the ocean often likes to give it back. So, there is an amazing amount of trash kind of all over place and the women have decided that it is time to do something about it. We are going to start with cleaning up the trash on the river on Monday and I am pretty excited about this. This place is extremely beautiful and with a little TLC, it could easily be the paradise that it was before the boats arrived with the plastic. I will also start working with the village on a more sustainable plan for the village’s rubbish but that issue will not be an easy one.

I am pretty sure that we have the best house of all the PCVs in Fiji. Maybe the world? The domestic life continues to improve. I ‘borrowed’ half a bag of concrete from where they are building two new classrooms for the primary school to fill some gaps on the toad highway and also to put a tilt on the shower floor towards the drain. Until last week, the floor sloped away from the drain, leaving Lake Fiji every time one took a shower. No more! Now the soapy water flows out, directly into the ground like God intended it to. The garden is also coming along nicely. In fact, just a couple of days ago, we had our first salad! We now have lettuce, bok choy, arugula, basil, cilantro, and radish ready for eating. I even found a somewhat feral cherry tomato plant that belongs to our neighbors, but they have been away for a week, so we have had tomatoes even. Oh man, do I miss tomatoes. Our tomatoes are growing like weeds and should be flowering soon. The squash is flowering now, but we just found out that since there are no pollinators for squash, you have to pollinate it yourself. I still haven’t figured out which of my plants are male and which are female but I need to figure it out soon because they are hot to trot. The celery, carrots, bell peppers, okra, beans, and broccoli are coming along at a much more moderate pace, but everything grows really fast here compared to Portland. Then there is the added bonus of near-constant papaya, bananas, and citrus and the mango tree in front of our house that is just starting to fruit now. We haven’t really had electricity for the last few weeks because the school is on a two-week holiday and with the students gone and many of the teachers gone as well, they didn’t bother to buy any more diesel for the generator. So, the few of us left here have been rationing it to last until the term starts back up. We are at about an hour of electricity per night now, just enough to charge things and have some light for cooking. I kind of like that amount, so it is going to feel like crazy excess when we have electricity for four hours every day again. That seems like such a luxury—like warm-water showers or beer. That being said, all of the teachers just came back from the school holiday so we are back to no water every morning and evening. It sure was nice having unlimited water for a while.

Some of you have been asking what you can send and I have usually said something like, “Geez, I think that we have pretty much everything that we need.” Well, I was wrong, stupid, or both. After receiving some care packages, I am now realizing what we are missing. So, here is the list of exactly what I am missing:

Magazines, specifically Newsweek-ish ones, Sports Illustrated, etc (Mary, you are still on Popular Science, right?)
Chocolate would be a dream come true. I like the dark stuff myself, but a Reese’s Peanut
Butter Cup would change my life.
While I was never really an energy-bar guy before, those Cliff bars were really good. I
guess that any kind of snack like that would be great.
Crossword puzzles.

You get this idea. If you do send a little care package, it is best to send it in a large envelope, padded if need be. Use a box as a last resort as boxes get searched and typically don’t arrive with everything that was sent. I am also more likely to have to pay large duties on it if it is in a box but not in an envelope.

Cat Update

I know many have you have been wondering, since I didn’t mention it in my last e-mail, what is the state of our cat. Well, I apologize for omitting it in the last blog, and will more than make up for it here. Cats as pets are certainly not the same thing here as they are in Merika (you can figure out what that means, right?). It turns out that if you see a kitten or puppy or pony that you really like, you can just take it, play with it for a few days, torture it if you like, maybe feed it, maybe not. Well, that is precisely what happened to our current cat, Pierre, and I am guessing that is what happened to our last two cats (one of which was prodigal, but you will have to go back to that story). So when Pierre went missing again, we didn’t find him for days, and when we did, someone had taken him to the neighboring village. He’s back now and we outfitted him with a flea collar with the word “kaivulagi” (whitey) on it to ward off potential feline heisters. Last night he came without it, making it obvious that someone had taken off this strange cat choker. I think that we might try yarn next. As long as people know he is the kaivulagi cat, they will hopefully leave him alone. The problem is that since we don’t torture him, he hasn’t learned a healthy fear of human like every other cat that sprints away upon first sight of a person, specifically the smaller versions of people.

Well, we have no just hit the 4 month mark in Fiji and the 2 month mark at our site and the place is really starting to grow on me. Oh wait, IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN PARADISE!! I recognize that I have had some pretty sweet jobs in my life: lifeguard, ski instructor, bird chaser, diver, school custodian (not that one so much, although the people were wonderful), but this one ranks among the best. Seriously, I snorkel for a living. Well, it is more than that. I also eat lunch and take a nap. Here is how it works. I and my counterpart go to a village on the island and we give a workshop on coral reef health, fishing practices, farming practices, and discuss individual needs of the village. Then we teach them how to do monitor a reef doing a simple transect. Of course, I have already taught them how to do the transect on dry land so once we hit the water, they get to work and I play around in the most diverse coral I have ever seen. And the fish are pretty cool too. These areas that we monitor are tabu areas, areas that are permanently closed to fishing to serve as a breeding ground for their fishing areas. This has the entirely desirable effect of creating underwater parks teeming with life and beauty. I saw the healthiest coral reef that I have ever seen in my life yesterday and it is immediately in front of our neighboring village. After all of this, we eat lunch and take naps—all of us together. That is how we roll in the villages.

After I hit every village (14 total), I will be working with each village on its individual needs. So far, that looks like mangrove planting to restore habitat and control erosion, seaweed farming for a source of income, terrestrial reserve creation, alternative energy (maybe even micro-hydro power!), and feral pig eradication. Two years already seems like a very short time.

Let’s talk about food. At this point, I would have to say that Sally and I are officially subsistence farmers. I love the feeling of standing next to the garden in the evening, asking myself, “What looks good?” You name it, we got it: carrots, radish, lettuce, garlic, onions, scallions, beans, cilantro, basil, and all kinds of tropical fruit with tomatoes, zucchini, watermelon, ginger, pinto beans, broccoli, pumpkin, etc, etc all flowering and ready to fruit. We knew that first period before the garden came in would be the hardest and I am happy to report that we have arrived!

And some business--for those who have been accostmed to our phone calls, I'm sorry to say, that gravy train is over. Our phone company ended the promotion and it is now very expensive for us to call the US. So, it looks like the phone conversations have come to an end. It is back to letter writing, so get to it! That being said, we may be getting closer to having internet on the island, in which case we can just rejoin the masses communicating with a screen.

Blogging by Proxy

So it turns out that you don’t actually need electricity or an internet connection to blog; you just need a solar panel, a laptop, one of those micro-SD cards, a post office and a willing partner (who presumably has internet and electricity. So, here is the deal. I am writing this on my laptop and will save it to a micro-SD card which I will then mail (along with a very nice as-yet un-composed letter) to the in-laws. My own parents, upon reading this, might wonder why I didn’t choose them for the updating task, but then again they chose my sister as the executor of their will. There are some things that folks are good at and some that folks are not good at.

Anyway, Sally and I have no been here at our site for just about a month and things are more or less running along swimmingly (as a matter of speech only—amazingly enough, Sally has yet to get into the water). Here are some topical updates upon which I would like to elaborate:

1. Hair: After messing around with short-ish hair for the last couple of months, in my last encounter with clippers, I decided that it would be a while before I saw them again and just shaved it all off. This has led me to a couple of realizations. The first that is that I have no one in my life who truly cares for me, because if I did, one of them would surely have just shaved my head while I slept. For 15 years, I toiled with long hair, dreadlocks, and various cuts with a clear Dutch bent. This was allowed with only the occasional comment in jest about my long hair. Never again. The liberation that comes with not having any hair has revolutionized my life. Drying off after a shower has become basically non-existent, not to mention swimming. I can’t believe that I even enjoyed swimming until now. I won’t even get into my realizations of hairlessness with a snorkel mask. Thanks for 15 years of hell, jerks.
2. Refrigeration: There sure a lot of things that we (and by we, I mean) put in fridges that have no business there. For example, did you know that eggs last weeks, WEEKS, without refrigeration? Coat them with a little oil and they last for well over a month. Here are a couple of other items that you will be shocked to hear either suffer from or are unaffected by the fridge: cucumbers, carrots, peanut butter, honey, eggplant, toothpaste, tomatoes, mustard, ice, margarine, potatoes, and jam. Were you paying attention? If so, you would have realized that at least one of those things is a dirty lie (and one is just useless). Ice is the glaring exception. Oh martini, how I miss you. They say if you love something let it go…etc. Fiji Bitter is bad enough of a beer that it isn’t worth refrigerating anyway.
3. I Love Cats: Some of you may remember that one of us (not me) once had a club called the ‘I Love Cats Club’ that I think had approximately 1 member, give or take. Well, that club has been re-chartered but with a new name: ‘I Kill Cats Club.’ You may remember from my last blog that we were 0-2 on cat raising in Fiji, but have not had our spirits dampened in the least. In fact, that last cat (Snowball II) had a weird rat-like tail. Good riddance, I say. Out with the old, in with the new. Our latest attempt is a black and white male kitten that is now going by Pierre due to his moustache and little spot of goatee. We have had him for well over a week, breaking all previous records and it appears that he may stick around. He has caught 2 mice and some large number of skinks, earning his keep as far as I am concerned. Then again, if he pees on the mosquito net again, we may be lamenting the unfortunate ‘disappearance’ of yet another cat.
4. Jobs?: Well, Sally sort of teaches but now the school is on ‘holiday’ for the next two weeks. One would be hard pressed to find what in the hell I am doing. I have some pretty good excuses as to why I am not doing much in the way of work on which I may or may not elaborate later. Suffice it say that Sally’s skills in nursing and mine in…well…beer-making are going largely underutilized. Always ready for a good fight, I spend the majority of my day beating back the relentless tropical weeds that are hell-bent on taking over my radishes. They will not win this fight for I have time on my hands. Really, I spend a lot of my time in the raising of food. It is amazing how basic this is and how much I love it. I have always loved gardening but when the hobby becomes the difference between having food and not, I think that is when it becomes farming, in which case I can finally start calling myself a farmer, a life-long dream of mine. So far, after about a month, we aren’t quite having gazpacho or anything, but there is lettuce, eggplant, basil, cilantro, cassava, and lots of bok choy, broccoli, tomatoes, celery, and carrots on the way. As expected, these things (with the exception of cassava, eggplant, and bok choy called kaveti [cabbage] here) are absent from the island. No one grows them and hence no one sells them. Given that this is the most fertile soil in Fiji, that seems a little strange to me. The issue may be the weeds. They are really amazing. Fijian ideas of agriculture include cutting off the top of what you are eating (in the case of dalo [taro] or tavioka [cassava]), throwing them towards the ground, and in 6 weeks, pulling them out and eating them. They beat the weeds. Any sort of intensive agriculture was recently brought here and just hasn’t made it mainstream yet. So, my vegetable garden is the source of much consternation and conversation. They know about most of these vegetables, but I don’t many have never seen someone actually growing them, much less a kaivulagi (whitey).
5. Wine: When Sally and I left Suva for our placement, we could afford 6 bottles of very cheap wine that we then carted this far to last us for 2 months. That would be a bottle approximately every week and a half. Well, a couple of days ago, we decided that rationing be damned, we were eating pasta and would be moving up our bottle #3 a few days. It was a great idea, right up until I spilled my glass. Grief is the only word that can be used for what I felt that night. I guess despair would work as well. Fine, there are a lot of words, but you get the idea. It will be weeks before bottle #4. There are two cases of hand-selected fine wine along with 3 gallons of oak-aging whiskey in my basement in Portland, I thought as I was cleaning up my ration. It was the first time I thought that I don’t have what it takes to be a Peace Corps Volunteers.
6. Grog: Kava is a very poor excuse for a drug, in my opinion. Here, it goes by the name of yaqona or simply, grog. It tastes like muddy water with a hint of something like cinnamon or mint—just a hint, mind you. The first few are pleasant enough; I even sort of like it. But the deal with grog is that you keep drinking bowl after bowl of it. Its effects are pretty mild: some numbing in the mouth and if you really drink a ton of it, you feel a little groggy. Drinking yaqona is what you do here, all the time. It is a part of every meeting, drunk every time you visit someplace, during weddings, funerals, or any celebration, or just what you do at night with a guitar. My problem isn’t so much the grog as much as the sitting cross-legged on the floor for hours at a time. Seriously, if you think this is no big deal, try watching a movie sitting cross-legged on the floor. Now imagine that the floor is not carpeted. Luckily for me, I have some practice in that my language classes were taught 4 hours at a time with us sitting cross-legged on the floor, but at least then you can move around and lie down if you want. No dice with the yaqona. It must be drunk sitting cross-legged. This is my life 3-4 nights per week.

So, that is a bit of a snapshot of my life here. I never wrote about the work but you must be tired of reading this. I certainly am tired of writing it. Stay tuned for the next installment where I discuss the following: pigs, Pierre II, bread-making without an oven, and your visit!

Back so soon?

Despite my dire warnings of no internet access for a Peace Corps mandated two months of geographical isolation, here I am! Peace Corps requires you to stay in your community for your first two months to make sure that one is fully connected and integrated with the community before one starts gallivanting around the country. But, it turns out that when Peace Corps says two months, they mean about a week and a half. I have been called back to Suva for training on what is called the EAP (which I think stands for Emergency Action Plan. Hopefully, the training will clear that up for me). It turns out that the combination of an illegitimate government and a Methodist Conference is a scary mix. There are currently laws in place putting the smack-down on free speech and on freedom of assembly and one thing that the Methodists in Fiji are known for is getting together in large groups and doing a lot of talking. That has the government nervous and when the government gets nervous, so does Peace Corps.

Peace Corps is requiring that one person from each island attend the training and after primary elections, multiple debates, a caucus in the village of Mudu, various posturing and speechifying, it was decided that I would go to Suva instead of Sally. On some islands, they probably had to really think about who would be best to attend the training; on ours, I think that Peace Corps literally flipped a coin. So, I am going which is great because we really did forget some key things on our first attempt to buy everything that we will possibly need for the next two months. For example, how did we forget onions? And if we were going to be so cheap as to buy just one pot, why didn’t we buy one that would actually fit enough food for two people? It is like we have never bought a pot before!

But this boring—the real question I am sure that you would ask me if you could would go something like this, “How is your new home?” I would answer something like, “Paradise. Seriously, paradise.” From our porch, we look at the ocean. Because of where the island sits, it just happens to have the perfect weather, not hot like it is up north or out west or wet like it is in the southeast. It seems to be somewhere in the 80s every day with a gentle breeze off the water, which we can see quite plainly from our front porch. Once it rained for a couple of minutes, but otherwise, it is sort of partly cloudy every day. It can get hot in the sun, but our house stays nice and cool. Sally started work almost immediately. So far, she is teaching English and a couple of other things at the high school, but she will add health-related stuff a little later. I, on the other hand, have been left to my own devices for a little while. There is the matter of a grant that I am writing for my main work (more on that later) but by and large, I have been busying myself with making this place a home.

The first order of business has been the garden. As you may have heard (from me…repeatedly) there are no vegetables on the island that one can buy. Some folks grow “Chinese cabbage” (bok choy) and eggplant, but that is about it. That being said, papaya, bananas, and coconuts grow like weeds and every few days the school chaplain brings us some fruit that he finds around. There are papaya and lime trees right behind our house and right in front is a giant mango tree. Mangoes aren’t in season yet, but come October, I am going to eat mango until I vomit. Seriously, that is my plan. But I have spent the better part of a week clearing weeds and grass on the side of our house for the veggies: tomatoes, eggplant, onions, garlic, squash, cucumber, lettuce, bok choy, watermelon, bell peppers, carrots, strawberries, etc. They say that this island has the most fertile soil in Fiji. We’ll see about that. There are also a couple of local foods that we already have on our property—a root crop called tavioka (cassava in English) and a type of green called bele which are both delicious. I fried up some tavioka today and tasted like French Fries (I would call them Freedom Fries, but you never know how a dictatorial government might react to such incitement). Yummy.

And most importantly, we are now the proud parents of a kitten which has not quite been named, but we figure is OK since cats don’t give a damn what their name is. So far we have got Nala II, a name in reference to Sally’s original cat in Tumavia which mysteriously “disappeared” after Sally fed it flee and tick repellant, Snowball, assuming that this cat will also “disappear” at some point, then we can start burying the sequence of cats in the backyard with sequential names, and PG, which Sally might have decided on that stands for something like Pretty Girl, or was it Precious Girl. Either way, it will be met with radical indifference. It is all the same to me as the cat has two jobs in my book: 1. Be cute until you grow up and then 2. Kill rats. Item 1, she has nailed and as for item 2, she appears to be a bit of a natural. Just this morning, a baby gecko fell off the wall and landed right in front of her. She pounced on that moth-eater like it was carrying plague and was only momentarily distracted by the senescent tail wiggling around after the gecko dropped it. I was very proud, although I have noticed in increase in moths this evening.

Finally, I will try to wrap this up with some idea as to what I will be doing here. Koro has a lot of natural beauty and unspoiled natural areas coupled with some pretty devastating environmental practices. So, a branch of the University of the South Pacific called IAS (Institute of Applied Science) requested me to serve as an advisor to a newly formed committee called the Koro Island Yaubula Management Support Team, yaubula meaning “environment.” My job will be working with the 14 villages of the island to help manage their resources in a more sustainable way. The fist item of business will entail a whole lot of snorkeling. Each village theoretically has an off-limits area (tabu) to fishing, but there is little oversight and monitoring of it. So, I am going to be working with the fisherman of each village to teach them the importance of having a reserve to make sure that fish are reproducing to stock the areas where they can fish. The best way to do that is to put on a snorkel and go look at the differences between what happens when an area is left alone and what happens when it is over-fished. Then, we will put in place a structure for studying the effects of the tabu area to show how it improves fishing where they can fish. After this will come all of the ways that they are killing the reef by what they do on land, but that will come later and this is too long as it is.

So, we are pretty excited about where we ended up and feel like we hit a bit of jackpot. We are excited for anyone to come and visit, but you really have to mean it if you want to see our house. It would be a 12-hour plane ride from LA, followed by a 5-hour bus ride and then an 8-hour boat ride, getting you here at 2am. Perhaps we can meet you somewhere. We’ll figure that out once you get your plane ticket to Fiji!

Here are some photos for your edification. This is our kitchen now! Compare that with the photos below and we have really come a long ways, no? The next one is Sally in our living room AT A TABLE! Awesome right? Then there is Sally using our new broom. It is made out of coconut fronds and a stick, but that thing really works. Then there is what will become our source of food that I fought to reclaim from the "grass." You have never seen how fast a weed can grow until you have tried to weed in the tropics. No wonder no one grows tomatoes here. Check out the fence that I made from sticks. Finally, there is the second cat that we have now lost. We are going to start naming them Snowball (I-V) since we keep losing them.

The Last One...for awhile

Today Sally and I will storm the beaches of our island. Well, by today, I actually mean tomorrow since the boat drops us off at midnight, and when I mean storm, I actually mean drag since we are bringing with us everything that is required to make a home and feed ourselves for two months. And when I say beach, I mean…well you get the idea.

Sally and I have been in Suva for the last 5 days since swearing in as Volunteers only because our first boat wasn’t until today. If Peace Corps had their way, we would have gone directly to our site from swearing in, as some did. We had the fine luck of infrequent transportation so we got to stay in a fairly nice hotel (nice is relative term here, but it is certainly comfortable—hot water and everything!) and spend some time thinking shopping for a home that has absolutely nothing in it save a bed frame, a table, and 2 chairs. Since there is no store on the island, we also had to buy all of the non-perishable food for two months until we can get back to the mainland. That’s right, I just called the larger island of Vitilevu the “mainland.” Interestingly enough, that is what folks around here call it. Anyway, it won’t do us any good to buy perishable food since we won’t have refrigeration. For that, we bought plenty of gardening materials and seeds. We will have at creating a garden immediately upon landing since those will be our only vegetables for the next year. Until those come in, it will be a lot of seafood and dried goods (beans, rice, lentils, etc). Of course, there is always plenty of taro, cassava, yams (root crops), and coconut around the island in addition to the fruit trees that seem to be no one’s and everyone’s (look up the Tragedy of the Commons for why this is always a recipe for eating unripe fruit). So, it is starting to feel like our food worries about not having a store at which to shop are going to be assuaged by the abundance of free food on the island and the absurd fertility of the soil there.

On the job front, I just had a meeting with the group that actually requested an environmental Peace Corps Volunteers (heretofore PCV) and it answered a whole lot of questions for me. When I went to the island for my site visit, it didn’t seem like anyone knew why I was there, outside of my “Initial Community Contact Person” and even he didn’t seem to have a very firm grasp of what was going on. So, it turns out that I am there because the University of the South Pacific requested me. Actually, it is a branch of the University called IAS (Integrated Applied Science) that wants me there to spearhead a committee called the KIYMST (Koro Island Yaubula Management Support Team—Yaubula means Environment, roughly). The island has rampant environmental and ecological problems that are affecting the health of the people on the island, such as deforestation, free-roaming feral pigs (which crap everywhere), overfishing, poor waste management, and sewage leaching into the water. All of these things have the effect of polluting the reef immediately offshore of the villages, which damages the reef and lowers fish counts (already lowered by overfishing) on which the island relies for food. The fish counts have gone way down in the last 5-10 years and there seems to be an understanding by the people there that something needs to be done. So, the 14 villages of the island (along with the help from IAS and me) are forming this committee to educate communities through workshops about the issues and to help them find solutions to the problems.

It is lofty. At this point, it doesn’t exist, and my first item for business is to land some money for it. We have identified a possible funder, and I will spend my first week in my new home writing part of a grant proposal. Theoretically, Peace Corps asks that we don’t try to do these big projects right away, but I don’t want to miss this money and it would just be good to have so that I can just hit the ground running once I am settled enough to get moving on this stuff. After this meeting that I had with the IAS folks, I am really, really excited about this placement. Seriously, from this vantage point, this appears to be what I have wanted to do for a long time.

So, that is the boring stuff for you. If you have made it this far, congratulations. This will most likely be the last entry for a while, because there is no internet connection there. That being said, the high school had just gotten a grant for computers when we were there last and they were talking about getting internet on them. The infrastructure is there to have a very slow connection, so it is possible that they have done it. How things work around here is that people talk a lot about something well before anyone does anything about making it happen, if it happens at all. So, since they were just starting to talk about it, I am guessing that it is nowhere near fruition. It may be Sally’s job to get that moving. In fact, Sally may be responsible for bringing the 6th largest island in Fiji to the digital age. That’s a riot, huh? It appears to be the case that if you know how to do anything here, that qualifies you to be an expert. Fiji invited Peace Corps here to meet their needs for trained individuals and they meant it.

So, let me wrap up this very long entry and say that Sally and I miss home very much and mostly miss our families (close friends, feel free to include yourself in the previous statement). It is hard to be so far away from growing nieces and nephews, especially when new ones appear in our absence (Katie and Bob, I am definitely not talking about you guys here). That being said, we are really happy here and excited to get started our site. Please remember to write us as it will be our only communication from you all once we are there, excepting the occasional phone call. Here are some important topics on which to hit on when you do, in case you are dry on ideas: relationship news, news on houses or businesses, quotes from nieces and nephews, the weather, what you had for dinner (seriously), any sort of news, and of course regular updates on my beloved Giants. Also, if anyone can go online and find out what in the hell is happening with our government, please look that up and send it to us. All of that is censored here and as far as we know, everything is rainbows and kittens, which is weird because it definitely was not before we left. Signing off for now. We love and miss you and will check in a few months.

Our new house

OK, so the next items for consideration are our new house. So, here is what it looks like from the outside, although we were promised a new paint job by the time that we get back. From what I know about this culture, saying that you will do something, does not have any bearing on whether you will do that thing. We have also been promised a bed.

That being said, what our house lacks in paint, it more than makes up for in view. This is the sunrise over the Pacific from my porch. You read that right FROM MY PORCH! Awesome.

But then this is the kitchen...

...and this is the bathroom. This is Sally and me on our first night in the house. As you can see, we are not long on furniture. The solution to that problem is not yet obvious. But we look pretty happy in our matching clothes! Also note the jock-short hair on the guy on the left.

Hooray for photos!

So, I am finally at a computer that has fast enough internet to load some photos. So, here are a couple. These are some from training that are now past tense, but still cool. For example, here is a photo of my family that I lived with for 2 months. They were really great. Here is my mom Bua, my dad Samu, and my brother Mosese. (The short one is Sally). My brother was 23 years old and I really like him. We are planning a visit by him to Koro.

Here is a photo of my house that I lived in for 2 months. While it didn't look like a gem from the outside, my mom was really great and she kept a pretty clean house. I'll take small and clean any day. .

The shot of the buckets and chair is my shower. There wasn't actually a shower so we used the buckets. It works pretty well and I am starting to enjoy the bucket method of bathing. The mosquitos in the shower I never got used to. I am not very good at this blog thing so I can't figure out how to add more photos to this post. So, I am going to start another one. Be right back.

A Real Volunteer!..almost

Well, I am just two days away from officially swearing that I will uphold the constitution and that I won't bomb anything that looks American. That being said, I will be in the ambassadors house on Thursday so I will have my chance before actually swearing in. As of today, I have been in Fiji exactly 2 months and am 2 days away from the end of training. We just had our language proficiency exam, which I passed by colors (as opposed to flying colors). Sally, on the other hand, set a new standard in how fast one can physically learn a language. The best part is that she is supposed to wait to talk until after her husband has which means that she is often standing next to me translating and feeding me lines. It seems to work.

Anyway, training is over which means that we will be heading to our site soon. Because there are very few boats to our little island in the middle of nowhere, we can't go straight to our site after swearing in. We will be in Suva for almost a week giving us some time to buy everything that we will need to eat and live without electricity for 2 months. That will be the next time that we will be able to leave our island. This move means that we have a new address. It goes like this:

Brian Smithers/Sally Moyce
PO Nasau
Koro Island
Lomaiviti Group, Fiji
South Pacific

The mail comes once a week on the boat and then we will go to the Post Office (a guy) and ask him if we got anything. He then looks in the sack and says yes or no. If it is no, I walk away very sad knowing that my next chance to be disappointed will be 7 days away. Please do your part to minimize that disappointment. There is still some debate as to whether the internet will make it to our island, but as of now, there is no internet there. That means that letters will be it for a while. That being said, the island has the infrastructure to allow internet and there is talk of us (Sally, really. In a strange twist of fate, Sally is going to be teaching computers at the high school) ushering in the digital age to Koro Island. Scary thought. So, I will post next week when I will finally be able to get some photos up here, and then that may be it for a while. Tune in next week!

Thoughts on Illness

Here are some things that I have learned about illness from living in Fiji that I didn't know before:

1. All sickness is caused by cold getting into your body. It is not important how hot the weather is because cold can still get in there even if it is 90 degrees out.
2. There is no such thing as a fever as all illness comes from being cold. (This is self-evident from #1 above.)
3. Any illness that cannot be traced to the cold can easily blamed on eating non-Fijian food, such as that made by the Indo-Fijians. Who knows what they put in their food.
4. All illness should be treated with heat--putting on as much clothes as you can and refusing cool liquids, such as water. The only fluids that you should take are hot teas. Socks are very important in this regard.
5. You cannot catch illnesses from other people, excepting in the case that the cold got into all of you together. While viruses and bacteria may exist, their role in illness is questionable at best.

Some crazy virus just swept through the Peace Corps folks (in addition to a whole lot of Fijians). it was less than pleasant. On the other hand, I just went snorkeling and it was amazing. Two weeks until I head off to Koro Island. That is when this blog should really start getting interesting.

My First Impressions

Sally and I just got back from our first visit to our future home and there is decent mix of excitement and fear. First, the excitement. We got to fly into Koro this time because of the boat schedule and got to see the island from above. Sally and I with our counterparts were the only ones on the plane that would have maxed out at 8 people anyway. The island looks absolutely amazing. It is a volcanic island so is ringed by lowlands by the sea that leads immediately to very steep hills/cliffs leading up into the highlands. The whole place is covered in rain forest with the occasional coconut plantation. And of course, you can see the coral reefs ringing the entire island. Hello, snorkeling (and hopefully diving). When we turned to land the plane, I was pleasantly surprised to see a runway, but less excited when that turned out to be a grass strip. Never fear, our 12 year old pilot did a masterful job.
Our house is a 2-bedroom wood house with running water, a flush toilet (oh yeah!), and here is the best part. We have a covered porch that looks out to the Koro Sea. We can watch the sunrise from there. Our house is above the village in the teacher's housing that is next to a high school. So, our neighbors are folks affiliated with the school. That part is cool because they are from all over Fiji and are more educated. The village is just a short walk down the hill that Sally has already fallen down and so far seems pretty cool. That being said, there is clearly a reason why I am there as the village is dealing with a lot of environmental issues that plague these small islands. I will have plenty to do to keep me busy.
Now for the fear. The island is an hour drive and an 8-hour boat ride from the nearest store. That boat comes only once per week and is sometimes cancelled for weather anyway. There is also no public transportation on the island which makes getting anywhere very difficult and expensive. There are no stores on the island, which means no beer, no ice (for martinis) and certainly no cocktail onions. That last part has Sally shaking (delerium tremens, I believe). We only have electricity for a couple of hours a day in the evening, which rules out refrigeration. And there is nowhere to buy anything of any kind. That means that until we can get some veggies out of the soil, we are going to have to rely on fish from fisherman in the village and a combination of dalo, cassava, and yams (3 very starchy roots). I will be eagerly anticipating the growth of that tomato plant! You should definitely wait to visit until that tomato plant is fruiting.
So, our desire for isolation in a tropical paradise has managed to come to pass. Now, we are kind of stuck with it. I am sure that once we get settled, it is going to be incredible, but we have some serious learning to do as to how to survive in such isolation. If you have any ideas, let me know. We have 3 weeks until we make the move! Sorry I don't have photos up yet, but I will soon. There has been no way to get me photos from the camera to the computers in the internet cafe, but I am hoping to remedy that soon. Until then, you can use your imagination!

My first try

Well, this is my first effort at this blogging thing, so here we go. I figured that this was better than mass e-mails so that I can write to my heart's content and you can read as little of it as pleases you. Plus, when I go to Koro, I will have no internet access and the rare chance that I have access, it will be much easier to spill the news into this than to individual e-mails. So, this is really just a test for myself right now. Stay tuned!